THE MEDIA BUSINESS

By BILL CARTER

Published: April 3, 1995

NBC gave a party last week to celebrate the third anniversary of its news magazine, "Dateline NBC," partly to show off an elaborate new $1 million set, and partly just to revel in the fact that the program is still around.

"Dateline," after all, is the program that almost brought down NBC News two years ago when it was forced to admit that it had faked explosions in a report on truck safety. That scandal led to an extraordinary on-air apology, the dismissal of the program's executive producer and two other producers, and the resignation of the president of the news division, Michael G. Gartner.

From that nadir, "Dateline" has managed in two years to climb to a point where it has expanded from one hour a week to three and where it now stands as a solid, reliable performer on three nights of the NBC prime-time schedule.

Moreover, "Dateline" is making a lot of money. A senior NBC News executive said the program, which is the network's only news magazine, was supplying perhaps as much as two-thirds of the profits of the news division. The executive said that NBC News expected to have record earnings of about $50 million this year.

The figures are only estimates and the overall value of "Dateline" still does not approach that of the "Today" show, which has re-emerged as the most popular morning news program. "Today" is on 14 hours a week, but half its profits go directly to stations and affiliates of NBC, a subsidiary of the General Electric Company.

But "Dateline" is certainly a significant story. The program has defied an otherwise sweeping trend toward diminished ratings for network news magazines. The original "Dateline," which appears Tuesdays at 10 P.M., has improved from an average rating of 10.7 last season to 11.5 this season. (Each rating point represents 954,000 homes.)

A Wednesday night edition of "Dateline," which replaced a NBC news magazine called "Now," has matched last season's performance by that program with a 10.8 rating. And the newest "Dateline," shown at 9 P.M. Fridays, has lifted NBC at that hour with a 9.7 rating, up from 9.1 last season.

In contrast, every news magazine at the other two networks is down in the ratings this season. The "20/20" program on ABC, a subsidiary of Capital Cities/ABC Inc., is off only slightly, slipping to a 14 rating, from 14.8. But the network's "Day One" has fallen to an 8.2 rating, from 9.9 last year, while "Prime Time Live" has dropped from a 14.2, to 11.3.

In fairness, the last program has rebounded extremely well since it was moved to Wednesday night from Thursday, where it was being trounced by NBC's blockbuster hit "E.R." Last week, "Prime Time Live" had a rating of 15.3, its best of the season.

At CBS Inc., all three news magazines have declined sharply. The leading news magazine, "60 Minutes," is down to a 17.5 rating, from a 21.4 last year, largely because CBS lost its reliable football lead-in when the network was outbid by Fox, which is owned by the News Corporation of Australia, for coverage of the National Football League. "48 Hours" has skidded from a 12 rating to a 9.2 this season, and "Eye to Eye" has fallen from a 10.4 to an 8.6.

Several of these news magazines, especially "Eye to Eye" and "Day One," are now threatened with cancellation.

"I feel pretty confident we'll have all three hours back next year and we may be the only ones who have that many," Andrew Lack, president of NBC News, said.

He attributed the growing success of "Dateline" to several factors, chief among them the decision to produce three hours of the same news magazine rather than three distinct programs. The combination allows features to be continued for several nights and alleviates the problem of news magazines at the same network competing for the same interviews and stories.

The cost efficiencies are also considerable, Mr. Lack said. "We have a staff of about 200," he said. "I believe each ABC magazine has 90 to 100 on its staff."

NBC also pays just one high-priced anchor team, Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips, and neither of them receives what ABC is paying Diane Sawyer (who makes an estimated $7 million a year) or Barbara Walters, whose contract is being renegotiated. (A NBC news executive said he had been told that ABC started its bidding for Ms. Walters at $10 million).

Mr. Lack acknowledged that the ratings for "Dateline" this year had been helped because "CBS is not even on the field." The prime-time ratings for CBS are in a free fall, which has helped the competition on all the other networks.

Still, Mr. Lack said, "Nobody thought we'd be able to do this well."

"We tried to brand a name," he added, "to tell the audience: 'Here we are and here's what we do.' And people responded."

The original brand name for "Dateline" was the kind usually applied by a hot iron: fake news. "That stigma was principally in New York and L.A.," Mr. Lack said. "It didn't travel."

Neal Shapiro, executive producer of "Dateline," said: "The stigma is gone. We never hear it anymore on stories. The only time we hear anything is when the competition is trying to shoot at us."

The main shot taken at "Dateline" is that its success is largely dependent on a style more tabloid-oriented than most of its news magazine competitors. Indeed, some of the program's highest ratings have been on nights when the subjects included phone sex and an account of a beauty queen who committed murder. "Dateline" has covered the day's events at the O. J. Simpson trial on 15 of its programs since January.

But Mr. Shapiro said that the tabloid charge was "not legitimate."

"It's a way for our competitors to explain our success," he said. "I've seen '20/20' do stories on sex in the '90's and 'Prime Time Live's big story last week was about prison guards beating up women. When we did phone-sex lines it was to illustrate how children were running up bills for these things when their parents weren't home."

Mr. Shapiro also pointed to a wide range of nontabloid "Dateline" features, including subjects like overhauling welfare, women in space and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"We're doing well," he said. "If we weren't, we wouldn't have hired 30 to 40 people away from CBS and ABC. We're doing some really good shows. I just think there are still some people who enjoy giving special scrutiny to 'Dateline' because of what happened in the past."